The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.20

c15.s1.20

The point of all this is not, of course, to celebrate the period as one ‘‘of equal opportunities’’ and ‘‘careers open to talent.’’ The essential point is that we should be wary of viewing the empire as a rigidly centralized and hierarchical bureaucratic structure rationally extracting and managing its agrarian resources. The Mughals certainly wanted it to be just that, but their imperial pyramid had to be built on the quicksands of personal networks with variously overlapping personnel and interests, which controlled the local and regional markets and thereby the surrounding agrarian tracts. It was these groups and networks that were in actual control of the sources of revenue on which the empire depended. Instead of controlling them from a commanding height, the Mughal, in order to get at the resources necessary for his survival, had to involve himself all the time in local affairs and had to stake his power in the ever-changing alignments of factions jostling for local and regional predominance. By the same token, local influence was free to encroach on the imperial center. The integrity of the whole was therefore in the intertwining and overlapping of interests competing for the distribution of power, rather than in the spectacular use of superior force, which moreover could all too easily lead to overextension. The system, then, was one of a "balancing of relative weakness," managed by conflict in which the Mughal could at best be a superior arbiter, arranging and rearranging the distribution of power by a judicious and sparing use of his resources.³² Viewed in this perspective, the imposing pyramid of imperial power sags into a rather shapeless horizontal reality, formed by constantly shifting power configurations and governed by pervasive conflict.